


All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

by livrelibre



Series: After Elimination Dance (an intermission) [8]
Category: Cradle Will Rock (1999)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-10
Updated: 2010-12-10
Packaged: 2017-10-29 23:18:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/325270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livrelibre/pseuds/livrelibre





	All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

Olive didn’t mean to spray the folks sitting near her in the front row but by the end of the play, she’d graduated from that first tentative quaver when she stood up, against the rules, and began to sing. Now her lines were flying from her lips like bullets in her own personal war. Even that force could barely contain the energy she felt. There were no line cues, no sets, no Adair to look to and that made it all better; that made it click for her all of a sudden in a way it never had before during rehearsals. Here they were doing it, bringing the play to life, one line and note at a time out of thin air with nothing but the force of their belief and the audience’s. She could feel everyone--Marc, Aldo and all the rest--in it with her, committed. The words were more than just lines now; it was their careers on the line, their hearts. And the audience was in it with them, standing up against the odds, rooting for them in what they were doing against all the fat cats and the bureaucrats who thought they could be shut down and bought and silenced with the label of Communist and the threat of starvation. She’d never felt anything like it and she thought she would explode from joy when the cheering started. They’d done it and no matter what happened next, whether she never had another role and was blacklisted, whether she had to sleep in the back of the theater and sing on the street again, whether she never saw Adair, she knew this was what she was meant for.


End file.
